Another sound came from the side of the property, closer this time, followed by the dry scrape of something pushing through grass rather than walking the track properly.
The timeline was moving faster than he wanted, though perhaps it had always unfolded this way and he had simply hadn't survived long enough to notice.
He left the shed, crossed over to the ute, and tossed the wrench onto the passenger seat before sliding behind the wheel.
The key turned, the engine roared, the noise felt reckless in the silence, but silence wouldn't protect him anymore, he was being surrounded.
His phone buzzed again in his pocket, he pulled it out with one hand while the other stayed on the wheel, no number this time, just the same blank unknown that had messaged him before.
"No contact name… again…" He muttered to himself.
Populated areas are not safe.
Arty stared at the screen for half a second, then looked up at the road ahead.
"Well. That was new."
The first message had told him not to stay inside. This one was pushing him away from population centres. The problem was that those weren't the same thing. Staying here was suicide, yet heading into town might be even worse.
The fact that something, or someone, seemed to know enough to warn him only made the choice uglier, he threw the phone onto the dash and pulled the ute into gear.
"Too late, I'm not staying here." he muttered.
The tyres spat dust as he swung out from the shed and cut past the front of the house, the broken fence line sliding by on his left as one of the shapes in the yard turned toward the sound.
Up close now, he could see enough to know that his memory hadn't exaggerated anything, the skin tone was wrong, that vacant hunger visible in their eyes.
The movement was wrong, the expression, if it could still be called that, was empty in a way that made him instinctively grip the wheel harder.
Then it sprinted toward the ute, not elegantly, not efficiently, just fast.
Arty didn't slow, he steered around it, tyres bouncing over uneven ground as he cut back toward the track, the rear of the vehicle fishtailing slightly before catching again.
In the mirror, the thing kept coming for several more seconds before losing pace, not because it had chosen to stop, but because the laws of distance had finally forced the issue.
"Good, you can stay behind me."
He hit the main dirt road and turned left instead of right, choosing distance over familiarity.
His place disappeared behind him in a plume of dust, shrinking quickly in the rear view mirror until it looked like any other forgotten semi-rural block with too much timber, too much heat, and not enough money.
A week ago he would have looked back at it with guilt, right now though, all he felt was the cold, necessary relief of choosing movement over nostalgia.
The road ahead curved through scrub and sparse paddocks, running between fences that looked thinner and more decorative with every second.
He kept his speed controlled, fast enough to cover ground but not so fast that he would miss something important.
That was the part that kept scraping at the inside of his skull now, even harder than the memory of dying, he needed information more than anything else.
Not guesses, not instinct, no panicked scrambles from one bad position into a worse one, he needed to know how far this had spread.
He needed to know if everyone was changing at once, or if there were pockets, triggers, routes, he needed to know whether town was suicide.
Whether the highway was blocked, or if the world beyond his front gate was collapsing in the same order he had assumed it would, most of all, he needed to know whether there was anywhere worth heading.
A ute appeared ahead on the opposite side of the road, angled badly into a shallow ditch with one wheel still spinning slowly in the dust.
Arty eased off the accelerator but didn't stop, the driver's door hung open, no one stood nearby, no one shouted for help, no movement at all came from the scrub around it.
That made it all some what worse, he slowed enough to look properly as he passed, his eyes flicking across the cabin, the tray, the ground beyond.
There was blood on the inside edge of the open door, not much, yet more of a dragging smear than a spray, a phone lay face down near the front tyre, one boot print led away from the road and into the grass.
Then a second set of tracks crossed them, bare feet, not bare, torn shoes, wrong stride, awkward looking gate, too deep at the toe, like the body had been pitching forward with every step.
"Nope. Not happening, no way I'm stopping for this" Arty mused out loud to himself.
Arty kept driving, he didn't need the rest of that story explained to him, the next few kilometres told him more than he wanted and less than he needed.
A gate hung open on a property where it should have been chained.
Cattle clustered in one corner of a paddock instead of spreading out to graze, all of them facing the same direction with the mute, collective alertness prey animals carried just before something broke loose.
A motorbike lay on its side near a culvert with no rider in sight, further along, a dog ran across the road at full speed and vanished into scrub without looking back once.
The world hadn't ended loudly, it had simply slipped into a new, broken rhythm where nothing behaved the way it should.
That was the part getting under his skin more than the violence itself, there was no clean edge to this, no moment where one reality ended and another began.
It was just a day that had gone wrong and kept going wrong until the shape of normal stopped holding, then his phone buzzed again.
He looked at it, then at the road, then picked it up and put it on speaker without taking his eyes fully off the track.
Radio static hissed for a moment, then the car radio he had left on earlier crackled back to life as the signal caught enough strength to drag a voice through.
"...state authorities are urging residents to remain calm and avoid unnecessary travel. Reports of aggressive incidents are increasing across multiple districts. Emergency services are responding to—"
Then the voice cut out under static.
A second voice came in, a woman this time, sharper, reading from a script with the brittle control of someone trying not to let her own fear through her voice.
"...continued investigation into last month's dark matter wave event has not established a direct connection to the current behavioural incidents, though officials have declined to rule out environmental factors—"
The signal warped, then vanished, Arty turned the volume off but didn't shut it down entirely, there it was again, another mention of the Dark matter wave.
A phrase everyone had spent the last month using like a joke, or a headline, or a half-baked excuse for migraines, dead birds, electrical faults, and every other strange little thing that never quite added up to a real threat.
He remembered hearing about it, he remembered dismissing it, as some odd atmospheric event, a scientific argument.
The kind of story people chewed on for three days before moving on to the next one, now at least it sat in his head differently.
Not quite as an answer, more as one of many threads starting to take shape in his head.
A shape moved on the road ahead and he braked automatically, the ute shuddering as the tyres bit into loose gravel.
A woman staggered out from behind a roadside sign, one arm bent wrong, hair matted across half her face.
Another shape followed her from the ditch, then a third emerged from further back near the fence line, his pulse kicked hard once and steadied.
"three really." He thought to himself
Too close to ram cleanly without risking the ute, too open to get out and fight without inviting something worse.
The road narrowed here, the ditch deeper on one side and a fence line pressing in on the other, he let the engine idle and watched them.
They were drawn to movement, sound too definitely, scent, would be one thing he wasn't sure of yet, he didn't know enough yet to say, what he did know was that stopping here would hand them initiative he couldn't afford to lose.
The woman lunged first, not at the bonnet but toward the driver's side as if some broken remnant of target choice still existed under the ruined mass of mangled flesh.
Arty made the decision in the same instant, he dropped the clutch nto reverse, backed up hard and fast enough to open space.
Then cranked the wheel and surged forward at an angle that took him off the road and over the shallow edge of the ditch instead of through the bodies themselves.
The suspension slammed hard, rattling his teeth, but the vehicle cleared and came back up onto rough ground beyond the fence line where old tyre tracks from farm access still cut through the scrub.
One of the things hit the rear quarter as he passed, thudding against the metal with enough force to make him wince, the mirror caught a glimpse of it tumbling, then rising again in that same unnatural scramble.
"Man they really don't break easy," he said quietly.
The access track ran parallel to the road for a short distance before curving toward a low rise.
Arty took it, partly because it kept him moving and partly because higher ground meant better visibility, the ute climbed over uneven earth and loose stone.
Branches scraping along the side hard enough to make him regret the decision and then vindicate it a second later when the land opened out, he stopped at the rise and looked all around.
From there he could see the road snaking away toward town in one direction and back toward the highway in the other.
Small movements dotted it at irregular intervals, not traffic, not enough, and not moving properly, a car sat sideways across one lane further off.
Beyond that, nothing obvious blocked the way, but enough isolated motion drifted between paddocks, culverts, driveways, and fence lines to tell him the problem certainly wasn't local anymore.
It was everywhere, not full saturation, not yet, the spaces between incidents still existed, that mattered.
His gaze shifted toward town, a faint spread of rooftops and low commercial buildings in the distance, too far to read properly from here, but close enough to feel like a decision pressing against him.
Town meant supplies, fuel, hardware, and food, though it also meant people, both living and these strange new things. It meant population density, bottlenecks, panic, and whatever "do not go to populated areas" was supposed to mean.
He looked back toward his property's direction, though he couldn't see it from here, the house was dead weight, town was even more dangerous, the road system was beginning to close, no good choices, just less bad ones.
His hand rested on the steering wheel while he thought it through, not in panic, not frozen, but with the cold awareness that every minute he spent choosing was a minute the world spent deteriorating without his permission.
A metallic scrape came from behind the ute, Arty's head snapped toward the sound, nothing there at first, then movement below the ridge, one of them had followed Arty tracking him along his journey.
No, it hadn't really followed him, it had simply persisted with relentless determination until terrain and chance happened to bring it here.
Another shape moved lower down, then another, he felt the skin along his arms tighten, this wasn't a safe overlook, it was never more than a short delay a respite.
That was the lesson, wasn't it, every place he found became useful for about five minutes at most before reality stripped the label off it, he started the engine again and stared once more toward town.
"Not home, Not here either." he said.
The ute idled harder beneath him, as if agreeing.
Arty put it into gear and pointed the nose toward the distant line of buildings, not because he trusted the place, not because he thought it was safe, but because staying still had already proven itself fatal in more than one life.
Behind him, the ridge gave up its illusion of security, ahead of him, the populated world waited like a trap he might have to enter anyway, so he simply drove.
The first houses on the outskirts appeared twenty minutes later, set wider apart than the town centre and far more unsettling for it.
More because the quiet out here should have felt less dangerous and instead felt staged, like the world was holding its breath before choosing where to scream.
A washing basket lay overturned in one yard, clothes scattered across the grass, a ride-on mower had been abandoned halfway through a strip of cut lawn.
A screen door banged open and shut in the wind of a house that otherwise showed no sign of life, Arty slowed down.
The houses were too exposed, too many windows, way too many blind corners, far too many people, or former people, who could have turned inside them with no one left to say where.
A service station sign rose above the next bend, fuel, food, road access, a decision point, his eyes narrowed slightly as he rolled toward it.
Two cars sat near the bowsers, one driver's door open, the others back hatch lifted, no visible signs of movement from this distance, no guarantee that meant anything either.
His phone buzzed again on the dash, he glanced down, unknown, just three words this time.
Too many inside.
His stomach tightened before his eyes lifted slowly toward the service station.
Arty's gaze lifted slowly toward the service station, his grip on the wheel tightened, the road into town no longer felt like the biggest threat in front of him, this trap was already choosing its shape.
He eased off the accelerator and kept rolling, every instinct sharpened now, not just by memory, but by the sickening sense that someone out there knew exactly how close he was to getting this wrong again.